This last weekend I woke up 25 years in the past. I was a Mormon missionary in Northern Germany and I tripped into some kind of sinkhole wondering what the fuck I was doing selling complete strangers on a megalomaniac modern-day messiah. I was breaking the mission rules by indulging in a contraband CD player, hanging out at record stores, and feeling like a lie. As a missionary there were rules of morality to which I was obliged to adhere, such as zero personal music, especially not popular wordly music. I came onto the missionary scene with a great deal of my own favorite indulgences already, and music proved to tip the balance for me off of righteousness and god. Small g.
Despite the promise of the spirit and celestial glory I felt a more personal and relevant connection with Simple Minds, U2 and The Smiths. In some suburb of Hamburg, where I was keeping a day job of harassing other day-jobbing Germans about religion, I found a record store with a poster of ‘The The’ in the window. The record was ‘Mind Bomb’ – prescient for all the Islamic turmoil we face today. The imagery in the artwork was brash and shocking – a white dove of peace, drenched in blood, pierced through by a belligerent bayonet. The first track, opening with a fugue of western percussion and lilting middle-eastern prayers, pushed to open my eyes; to look and SEE religion. See “whose words have been twisted beyond recognition.” Looking back within the lucid dream I see that the message must have been enough to wake me up.
The incident this last weekend was just watching the aimless indy film “Slacker” and, coincidentally, some edgy, amateur actors walking past a record store with the ‘Mind Bomb’ poster up in the window. I hardly remember what the sum of the autistic, Austin nut-jobs were rambling on about, but for sure Matt Johnson and Johnny Marr were staring out, disapproving of mankind. I never heard this record on the radio, never saw a video on MTV, and never heard anyone mention the music, but it set deeply in my foundation over the decades. Waking up into this memory I realized what an impact it made on me and how it was probably a tipping point for my dead soul. How can I mourn my soul for feeling the humanity of the Muslim prayer and Sinead O’Connor’s howling love dirge?